Greater Toronto Area · free, no sign-up
Shelfbee compares grocery, pharmacy, baby and household prices across six nearby retailers and twenty flyers in the GTA — ranked by price plus the gas and time it’d cost to get there. A $0.50 saving 25 km away isn’t a saving.
No sign-up required · weekly refresh · Canadian-hosted data
Illustrative preview · live results vary by postal code
The wedge
Every other comparison app answers “what’s cheapest on the shelf?” Shelfbee answers the question that actually matters when you’re deciding where to drive: which one or two stops minimise my total real cost — price, gas, and time combined.
A typical example
Same SKU. One store nearby, one store further out with a slightly lower shelf price. Real cost rolls both in.
Real cost = shelf price + (distance × $0.55/km) + (drive minutes × $0.33/min). Distances and drive times are estimated from your postal code via standard routing assumptions, not GPS.
The formula is configurable in the app settings. CAA per-kilometre and standard $20/hour time-value defaults apply unless you set your own. We never use vehicle, household, or income data you haven’t entered.
How it works
The only input we ever require. Sign-in, dietary preferences, and retailer preferences are optional; the comparison works at minute zero.
“Pampers size 3,” “2L 2% milk,” “whatever’s cheap for breakfast.” Natural-language queries match canonical products across stores so you can compare apples to apples.
Results are ranked by real cost, with the cheapest store flagged on each product card. Build a shopping list and the trip planner finds the one- or two-stop route that minimises your total spend.
Why Shelfbee
We’re not trying to be Flipp or Instacart. Each comparison app answers a different question; Shelfbee answers the one those don’t.
| Shelfbee | Flipp | Instacart | Retailer apps | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SKU-level price comparison across retailers | Within delivery range | |||
| Real-cost ranking (price + distance + time) | ||||
| Multi-store trip optimisation | ||||
| Flyer browsing | Own flyer only | |||
| Per-category retailer preferences | ||||
| Works without sign-up | ||||
| Free, ad-light | Ad-heavy | Delivery margin |
FAQ
Grocery, pharmacy, baby, and household prices across six tracked retailers in the Greater Toronto Area: Walmart Canada, No Frills, Food Basics, Shoppers Drug Mart, Costco, and Real Canadian Superstore. Loblaws, Fortinos, and Your Independent Grocer are also covered through the Loblaws-platform retailer chain. Flyer data from roughly twenty more retailers (Longos, Highland Farms, Dollarama, Sobeys, Metro, and others) is folded in as supplementary live results.
Real cost = shelf price + distance × $0.55 per km + drive time × $0.33 per minute. The per-km figure tracks Canadian Automobile Association estimates for an average compact car; the per-minute figure values your time at $20 per hour. A $0.50 saving 25 kilometres away costs $13.75 in gas alone before you account for the extra time, so it isn't actually a saving — the formula makes that visible.
No. Search, real-cost ranking, and the shopping list all work for anonymous visitors. Signing up unlocks personalisation — retailer preferences per category, dietary stamps on results, watchlists, and price-drop alerts — but the core comparison is free and never gated.
Tracked stores are scraped every Friday morning, after the Thursday flyer drop. When you search a specific item, Shelfbee also fires a live on-demand check against the Loblaws-platform retailers in your radius, so the freshest available price always surfaces. Each offer carries its own last-refreshed timestamp.
Walmart and Food Basics use professional anti-bot defences (Akamai and Cloudflare respectively) that would require paid bypass services we can't justify pre-revenue. Their headline flyer deals still flow through via the Flipp aggregator. We add retailers as their data becomes accessible at reasonable cost.
Supabase ca-central-1 (Montreal). Search queries are hashed at the IP level and auto-purge after 90 days. Marketing consent is opt-in, off by default, and follows CASL. The Privacy page details every column we retain and the right-to-delete pathway.
Some retailer links earn a commission. Ranking is never weighted by commission rate — every offer is sorted by real cost using the same formula, regardless of whether we earn anything from that retailer. The footer of every results page carries this disclosure.
Type a postal code; the rest is one tap away.